Business Insider exposes IMF's gold cover-up

At the urging of GATA and Sprott Asset Management CEO Eric Sprott, Business Insider reporter Vince Veneziani recently put to the International Monetary Fund five specific questions about the IMF's supposed gold reserves, questions similar to those put to the IMF by your secretary/treasurer in April 2008. (See http://www.gata.org/node/6242.)

Business Insider's two most important questions may have been: 1) Exactly where is the IMF's supposed gold? And 2) When the IMF sells gold, does any real gold change hands or are such sales essentially just bookkeeping transactions among central banks?

Tonight Veneziani reports that IMF spokesman Alistair Thomson replied to Business Insider's five questions as follows: "I looked through your message; we don't have anything more for you on this."

How's that for accountability from an international governmental organization?

Veneziani concludes: "Certainly this unwillingness is only fodder for skeptical gold folks out there."

Indeed, the IMF's refusal to answer Business Insider is more evidence that the gold it has been threatening the gold market with for years is an illusion -- that the IMF has no gold at all but only a tenuous claim on the gold reserves of its member nations, nations that, the ever-more-valuable CPM Group reports today, seem not at all inclined to part with it anymore:

Thus Veneziani and Business Insider have accomplished something apparently not yet accomplished by any major news organization in the world: They have put important, critical, inconvenient, and direct questions to a central banking institution. Further, Veneziani and Business Insider have been treated with contempt for doing so and have publicized the refusal to answer.

Not even The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal have yet dared attempt such ordinary journalism in regard to central banking.

The Business Insider report is headlined "Five Questions About Gold the IMF Refuses to Answer" and you can find it here:

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